BAUHAUS A CONCEPTUAL MODEL
The Bauhaus—founded in Weimar in 1919, located in Dessau beginning in 1925, and closed in Berlin in 1933—continues to be the most effective and successful export article of twentieth-century German culture. Even more than seventy years after it was closed, this interdisciplinary school for art, architecture, design, and theater has not lost any of its currentness.
On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, this profusely illustrated, comprehensive publication with around four hundred color illustrations reexamines and reevaluates the art school’s history and influence. In this collaborative project by the three leading institutes at the former sites of the Bauhaus’s activities—the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and the Bauhaus-Museum der Klassik Stiftung Weimar—the historic Bauhaus and the trail of its reception are closely examined and analyzed based on sixty-eight selected highlights, including the hitherto neglected aspects of the Bauhaus during the period of National Socialism as well as its international propagation and commercialization.
Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, introduction by Annemarie Jaeggi, texts by Barry Bergdoll, Klaus von Beyme, Regina Bittner, Gerda Breuer, Magdalena Droste, Peter Hahn, Christine Hopfengart, Christoph Ingenhoven, Michael Siebenbrodt, Klaus Weber u.a.
Exhibition schedule: Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, July 22–October 4, 2009 · Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 3, 2009–January 18, 2010.
Bauhaus
»So let us create a new breed of craftsmen without the presumptive division of classes that tried to build an arrogant wall between craftsmen and artists! Together, let us desire, conceive, and create the new architecture of the future, which will be everything in one single shape: architecture and sculpture and painting, produced by millions of hands, which will one day arise and become a crystal-clear symbol for a coming new belief.«
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto
Ninety years ago the Bauhaus was founded in Weimar. To commemorate this anniversary, numerous publications and exhibitions will celebrate the Bauhaus, acknowledging its status as one of the important art, design, and architecture schools ever. To this day, designs such as the »Bauhaus lamp« by Wilhelm Wagenfeld or the steel cantilevered chair by Marcel Breuer are still considered timeless classics. Modern materials such as the cube, the flat roof, concrete, steel and glass—as well as the serially constructed apartment building—have all become trademarks of this internationally famous center of modern industrial design.
Architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar on March 20, 1919, as one of the first schools of modern design. From 1925 to 1932, the Bauhaus was headquartered in the rising industrial city of Dessau, before it was forced to move to Berlin as a consequence of political unrest.
After Gropius resigned in 1928, Swiss architect Hannes Meyer succeeded to the post of Director. The last Director was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who headed the institution after 1930. 1933 saw the end of the history of the Bauhaus in Germany, as the National Socialists forced the dissolution of the school. Gropius and Mies van der Rohe emigrated to the USA, and it was from there that they spread their ideas about »new architecture.«
Right after World War I, the intellectual climate in Germany was marked by a sense of new beginnings and the longing to build a new, free society. In the beginning, there was Gropius´s utopian idea: the »architecture of the future« should combine all of the arts into an ideal unity. The Bauhaus would go beyond the confines of the usual academic traditions, using new didactic methods to educate a new type of artist. He considered craftsmanship to be the perquisite for e
